From terror attacks to the War on Terror, bursting real estate bubbles to crystal meth epidemics, sexual predators to poisonous toys from China, our list of fears appears to be exploding. Yet, we will be the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear can be running amok, and frequently with tragic outcomes. In the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive rather than fly-believing they wee staying away from risk-road deaths increased by 1,595. Those lives were lost to fear.

The Science of Fear is a about The Technology Fear: As to why We Fear the Things We Should not- and Put Ourselves in Great Danger disarmingly cheerful roundtrip shuttle to the brand new brain research, dissecting the fears that misguide and manipulate us every day.

As award-winning journalist Daniel Gardner demonstrates, irrational fear springs from how human beings miscalculate risks. Our hunter-gatherer brains developed during the aged Stone Age and struggle to seem sensible of a global utterly unlike one that made them. Numbers, for instance, confuse us. Our “gut” tells us that also if there aren’t “fifty thousand predators…on the Internet prowling for kids,” as a recently available U.S. Attorney General claimed, after that there has to be a lot. As well as if our “head” discovers that the quantity is baseless and no one actually understands the truth-there could possibly be one hundred thousand or five-we remain more fearful due to the fact we heard the big number. And it is not only politicians and the press that visitors in fearmongering. Companies fatten their bottom level lines with dread. Interest groups increase their influence with fear. Officials enhance their costs with fear. With an increase of information, warnings and frightening stories arriving at us every day from every direction, we are even more prone than ever to needlessly be concerned.

Real-world illustrations, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling produce The Research of Fear an entertaining and enlightening tour. Eventually, by revealing the mindset behind the countless methods our “gut” reactions lead us astray and invite others to manipulate us. The Science of Fear can make you brave.